In the agricultural industry, many varied uses are made of farm tractors for transporting various farm implements across a field. The tractor is often the most powerful and versatile piece of equipment employed on most farms. Many farmers have the need, however, of an earth-moving tool such as a bulldozer for clearing fields, shoveling snow, transporting grain or other feed, and the like. The expense of purchasing and maintaining a bulldozer, however, often proves to be economically unfeasible. It has long been desired to provide an attachment to ordinary farm tractors whereby such tractors could perform light earth-moving duties, and a number of bulldozer blade attachments have been suggested, one of which is described in my U.S. Pat. No. 3,870,171.
To the best of my knowledge, none of the attachable bulldozer blade devices of the prior art have been particularly successful. Problems have arisen, for example, with the manner in which the blade may be moved up and down, with the rigidity of the attachment of the blade to the tractor, and particularly with the effort required to mount a bulldozer blade to a tractor. Desirably, attachment of the blade to a tractor should be accomplished easily and quickly by one man, the blade should be positionable at an angle to the direction of travel of the tractor to permit snow plowing and the like, and the blade should be capable of being raised a considerable distance above the ground as when snow or other material is to be placed in a pile or loaded into a truck or the like. The tractor and its attachable blade should be of rugged, and yet simple, construction so as to increase reliability and reduce the likelihood of damage requiring extensive repairs.